On the Roof, Another New York, Above It All

By MICHAEL BRICK

Published: August 24, 2003

Even in these days of computer games, conditioned air and liability lawsuits, the people of New York still go to the roof. They charge through security doors and climb up fire escapes, and nervous landlords or busybody building superintendents are no match.

They go seeking cool relief, a little conversation, the spectacular belvedere from what amounts to the ceiling of the city.

''Sometimes you're up on the roof, you have a little music, you close your eyes, you could be at the beach,'' says Leon Ichaso, a filmmaker. ''It's celebratory. There's a sense that they can't catch you up there.''

With summer winding down, this parallel urban landscape is in its final distinctive days. Rich or poor, native or immigrant, on deck chair or cardboard box, New Yorkers are on their roofs for just a few weeks more, to watch, rest, play, drink, romance, smoke, hide, show, gasp, sleep, escape.

These roofs are places of peculiar beauty.

On windless afternoons when the air is all stillness and soupy radiance, the only sounds can be a muted horn and shout, the tremolo redundancy of the ballad of the ice cream man. Skylights poke up from the world below. So do chimneys, antennas and other strange and faintly ghostly protuberances. At certain elevations, there are man-made canyons of brick and glass and parapets like stopped waterfalls. On those cliffs of concrete and steel, there are lounge chairs, topiary, a child's make-believe house, little Greetings from Tar Beach.

Brittany Hastings, 22, a student, climbs up on long summer afternoons while her boyfriend makes money inside a building somewhere. He makes enough of it that she lives in a luxury skyscraper in the financial district, and she lets a quiet little Yorkshire terrier named Polo keep her company while she sketches.

''It's easier than going to the park,'' Ms. Hastings says. ''You can go back and forth to the apartment.''

She watches others do so.

''They eat,'' she says. ''I see ladies lay out.''

And in neighborhoods without buildings described as luxury, a rooftop is a place to play, a place that lures the young with temptations that seem safer to parents than those on the street.

''A couple of days ago, some kids were throwing onions off the roof,'' said Cashmere Rodriguez, 16, who lives in the Tremont section of the Bronx. ''I think it's kind of crazy.''

It is crazy, probably, as crazy as onions get, and still every generation goes to the roof. ''To chill,'' says Cashmere. ''Not get caught with the cops.''

The roofs, though, can be places of danger, too, where summer whimsy can end in a single misplaced footfall.

A lightning bolt killed Nathan Maddox, 25, the lead singer of a band called Gang Gang Dance, striking him as he danced in the rain on the roof of a girlfriend's building in Chinatown. That was last summer.

Two years ago, at 2730 Decatur Avenue in the Bronx, 9-year-old Julian Roman dropped from the roof, after jumping from one building to another, and then hanging on with little fingers not up to the task, banging off an air conditioner and landing feet-first with a force that knocked little bones through little wrist. He died within hours.

Now a sign there speaks in a language too clear for verbs: ''Nobody on Roof.''

From a Breeze to a Meal

The rooftop is a place for remembrance, too, of days before childhood and wonderment grew estranged.

''We used to call it Pebble Beach because they had pebbles on the roof,'' says Geraldine Johnson, 43, who grew up in the Marcy Houses in Brooklyn and lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant. ''We used to bring out the beach chairs. They'd bring out the couch tables and play Keno. It had a lot to do with the atmosphere. We always found something to do. Kids no longer jump rope. They no longer play tag.''

All grown up, she still finds reason to climb the stairs. ''If I hear sirens, I'll go to the roof, just to be nosy,'' Ms. Johnson said, ''because you can see for blocks. And hot nights, there might not be a cool breeze, but there's a breeze.''

These days the rooftops are places for commercial ambition, too. Once only repair workers and people like the Rosenwachs, makers of water towers, conducted business at this elevation.

Now here is the waitress at Alma, in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, serving 50 diners on the rooftop on a weeknight while four eat in the main dining room below. She carries real peppers past electrically lighted plastic ones to customers who could be in Northern California, judging by the view of apartment houses cascading down a hillside with porthole windows, Spanish tile and porches with curvy, shiny metal rails.

On the roofs is full-blown agriculture where once there was no flora save perhaps the leftover bouquet of a lovers' rendezvous. Here are the gardeners for Eli's, in a greenhouse atop a building at 91st Street near York Avenue, laying tomatoes, rosemary, coriander, basil and radishes closer to the sun than farmers in Kansas can.

The rooftop of today can be a gallery, too. In Bushwick, Brooklyn, Mark Rosenberg, 28, screens films on a roof. He has done so atop a series of buildings for six summers, at first for lack of an indoor site and now for artistic reasons as well.

''Out here, you can watch the changing views on the screen with the changing background,'' he says as a band called Marmalade opens for the movies.